For this post to make any sense we need a definition of RAD. There may be others out there but this is what I am using. RAD was coined in the 1980s as a way to allow software packages to meet schedules while risking features and, in some cases, usability. Rapid Application Development was designed to deal with the circumstance of application requirements changing faster than a piece of software could be developed. Is this still true today?

It is necessary to consider the fundamental idea of computing speed. If we take the computers of the 1980s (wow) and the 1990s, and compare them to the ones we have today we find (that there is no comparison) they are a lot faster today. The whole activity of software development is inherently much more accelerated compared to those days.

Todays development environments support drag and drop, and much greater life cycle integration and management. The tools are much more open and extensible, leading to agile development environments. Is RAD dead? I think original pieces of RAD are found in nearly all popular development environments available today. With the speed available in the various developer tools and more improved development processes, RAD, as defined earlier, is nearly ready to be moved to the remember Omnis7 column. OK, who knows what Omnis7 is?

Tags: rad, software development, ide, tools, development methodology